\chapter[Introduction]{AWoD: Alternate World of Darkness}
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\quot{A Complete Overhaul of World of Darkness material using many SR4 rules.}
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\section*{The World of Darkness is Overcrowded}
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\quot{You can't have been Rasputin, our guys were Rasputin!}

\desc{Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans -- otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.}

\desc{The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.}

\desc{So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the \underline{League of Extraordinary Gentleman}; but in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with Martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all at that point, it's a mess.}

\desc{It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that. \underline{The Vam}p{ire Book} is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally \emph{over nine hundred pages} long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.}